Personalization Technologies: A Primer

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Five years ago, I wrote a lot about personalization. Let's return to the topic to look at personalization technologies. The landscape has changed so much in the last few years that finding technology companies that just make products centered around these technologies is often difficult. Many have been bought by large CMS (define) or other platform companies. (If you're a personalization technology vendor, contact me, as I'm compiling a list for a future column.)

Personalization Technologies: An Overview

While most people know what collaborative filtering is, many don't realize it's only one of many technologies used for personalization. Depending on the problem, many technologies (most from the artificial intelligence world) exist to solve those problems. Finding vendors that aren't just academic groups for some of these technologies is difficult, however.

Here's a brief rundown of the most common technologies, what they're normally used for, and the pros and cons associated with them. Note: some companies have found workarounds for the cons I list. I list the cons here that are traditionally associated with the raw algorithms, understanding that products built around these algorithms do their best to mitigate these cons.

Neural Networks

Collaborative Filtering

Expert Systems

Bayesian Networks

Rules-based Engines

Vendors and Other Technologies

Are you using other technologies to enable personalization? Are you a personalization vendor specializing in one of the above technologies or a different one? If so, contact me. If there's sufficient interest in this topic, I'll write individual columns about each technology, along with the appropriate vendors.

Until next time...

Jack